Just finished Wind Up Bird Chronicle. It was great. Should I bother trying to piece the fragments together for the purpose of understanding the linearity of the story? The plot isn't completely tenable, but I'm wondering if you can infer anything about the underlying mechanism for all the dreams and characters' parallels within their different degrees of reality.

I'm still dying to know what was in the spy's envelope.

I read the book twice. The first reading took about a month. The second reading took three days. I don't skip chapters, paragraphs, or even words. I just read for 16 hours a day. The second time exposed more about the book than was possible before knowing the general structure of the narratives or without a sense of the characters. The earlier chapters -- particularly, Lieutenant Mamiya's mini-novel -- are surprisingly personal the second time around.

I am currently reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Nice book, but very long and not easy either. At times it even gets a little boring. But I have never given up on a book and I am certainly not giving up on it either.